I don't know, Forbin, I that is a great article. If a person holds to the Romantic notion of Art, then yes, games aren't and probably can't ever be Art.
I had never really seriously considered it from that direction before. There are a whole lot of people who think that the past 100 years of Art is a bit silly; an aberration that will hopefully pass so that we can get back to the real Art of the previous centuries. I am certainly sympathetic to that view, but don't really believe it myself (but I suppose i'm biased, in that I was trained at a relatively Modern Fine-Art school where most teachers held the opinion that the Romantic definition was at least 100 years out of date), but it was still an interesting article, well-reasoned and the most clarifying i've seen from that side of the debate.

Yeah, that's pretty self-evident. Regardless of how wrong piracy is, or how best to fight it (or if fighting it is even a good idea), it is by definition not theft. I don't think it helps the debate at all when people equate the two. It's unnecessarily hyperbolic.
I'd rather see an industry try to reduce piracy by humanising the creators and fostering a culture of supporting the artist, rather than trying to scare people and ultimately trivialising the issue with obviously false analogies ("you wouldn't steal a car...').

These have made me realise that while I greatly enjoy listening to those guys, for the most part I really don't respect their opinions, even when I coincidentally agree with them.
The way that Jeff and Ryan think about games is especially alien to me.
Still, they are entertaining dudes.

Recently finished Deus Ex: Invisible War for the 1st time.
Man, the reputation of that game being terrible is way overblown. It's for the most part pretty great. I mean, I hate the inventory, and the universal ammo was inferior to the old way (but not genuinely bad, just less good), but everything else that made Deus Ex great is there in spades.

I like a lot of the systems they introduced for conviction, but I don't like how they marginalised the non-lethal stealth aspect of the game. I played through Chaos Theory with zero kills (except for the disappointing mandatory pseudo-cutscene ones). I want that to be a viable option again.
I like knowing I can murder everyone if I need to, but I enjoy choosing not to and having the game actually support that as a viable option.

People use 'scripted' weirdly. All games are scripted all the time, otherwise nothing would happen or interact at all.
It's almost certainly the case that, this early in development, a bunch of stuff that happens isn't as dynamic as it would be in the finished game. But apart from set-piece things, like the bell falling, there is no way to actually tell that for sure from watching a video.

I just had a huge many-hour adventure exploring a distant land across the ocean from my spawn point & stronghold. I explored many sweet caverns and gathered a huge amount of rare resources and crafted some cool items and having dug deeper than seas of lava, having reached the bottom of the world and filled my inventory to bursting, I decided to dig my way back up and head home to store all my sweet new stuff. Zen-like focus, digging a mineshaft upward, suddenly interrupted by a deluge of water sweeping me back down into the earth. Panicking, but seeing daylight above the water, I forced my way back up through the last stretch of the mineshaft and emerged into what I then realised was the bottom of the ocean, relieved, knowing I had plenty of air bubbles and seeing the hazy sun through the water, I knew I would make it. Only to discover that though I was continuing to swim upwards, I wasn't reaching the surface. Air bubbles nearly drained, it dawned on me that the surface of the ocean was covered in a layer of ice and that I had been merely pushing against it straining for the surface while my air ran out. In my last few moments of air i quickly switched to my pickaxe and tried to break the ice, too late! With the ice, cracked and ready to shatter, I finally ran out of air and died, my hard won collection of rare resources and items scattered across the bottom of the ocean somewhere, lost forever.
fuckin' Minecraft